The Core shares an article from BU Today concerning the intriguing origin of stars, where CAS professor James Jackson answers some exciting questions. A sample:

For years, Jackson, a College of Arts & Sciences professor of astronomy, and his international colleagues studied [a dark, opaque mass that astronomers call] “the brick,” with the most powerful telescopes available and saw only, well, a brick, impenetrable and opaque. That changed last year with the unveiling of a powerful new tool called the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), a collection of 66 dish antennae, or radio telescopes, spread across an almost 10-mile stretch of Chile’s high-altitude Atacama Desert. The $1.4 billion project, to be fully functioning by the end of 2013, is three decades in the making and involves astronomers from Europe, North America, Japan, and Australia.

“ALMA’s going to blow the field wide open,” says Jackson, CAS associate dean for research and outreach, who was among the first astronomers to use the array. “We are poised to understand the origins of stars in an unprecedented way and that’s the origin of us.”